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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley.

By the time writer Donovan X Ramsey was about four or five, he'd learned a word that

could stop people in their tracks, a slur that could win an argument or put an into a bullies

wrath. The term was crackhead and growing up in the 90s, they were seen as pariahs,

both feared and ignored. Who are these people besides addicts? Ramsey's young mind wondered.

And what led them to crack cocaine in the first place?

Decades later, Donovan X Ramsey examines the destruction of the crack cocaine era through

the experiences of addicts, drug dealers, families, and community members. His new book is called

When Crack Was King, a people's history of a misunderstood era. Donovan X Ramsey is a journalist,

an author whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, GQ Ebony, and Essence.

He's been a staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times, News One, and the Grio, and has served as

an editor at the Marshall Project in Complex. Donovan, welcome to Fresh Air.

Hey, Tanya, thank you so much for having me.

So you start off this book, writing about a woman named Michelle, who was a crack addict,

who lived down the street from you growing up in Columbus, Ohio.

And you know, this story is so familiar to me and really anyone who grew up in a city ravaged

by the crack cocaine epidemic, everybody seemed to have a Michelle on their block,

which kind of makes it surprising that a book like this hadn't been written already.

Why did you want to write about it now?

Yeah, I wanted to write this book for lots of big grand reasons that have to do with,

...